Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1340
Rain, How do you hug a memory, don't try. June oven eBay saga. More Jane's shit. Confusion about Morrissey's trademark gripe. Flappy Bird guy copyright shit, griping about commercial insurance
Morning, morning, ca va? Comment allez vous? Bien? Bien. Thank you for all your appreciative comments about my new band-aid organization system. You guys are truly my people. Here is a quote from a solid feature with Chappell Roan in The Face:
“I can’t read my DMs anymore, because I cry so much,” Chappell says, finally. “But when people are like, ‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ – I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment. I don’t care about anything else, except giving space to people to be free. Because that’s what I needed so bad: freedom.”
Thats me with you guys! I do it for when you say “whatever you’re doing, it helped me.” GMHHAY readers are the best readers.
Me and Chappell Roan both crying in airport bathrooms but for very different reasons. Lorde is not texting me helping me with my problems, tho.
Congratulations to 42 year-old Leeds Civil Servant Rick Webb, who said he used the new bike share bikes “A couple times a week to get from Headingley to the city centre.” True hero Rick Webb. Thus ends today’s edition of our new column, The Rick Webb Watch™.
Look! We’re gonna win!
Today on the drive back from dropping Jane off Johnny Thunders told me “you can’t put your arms around a memory” which is very poetic and wise. But then he told me “don’t try,” which, like… Okay? How do you even try to put your arms around a memory? Seems tough. Easiest advice to ever follow: don’t try and put your arms around a memory.
We are listening to Mike Krol this morning. He has four albums, totalling maybe an hour or so? I Hate Jazz is 15 minutes. Power Chords is 33 minutes. Turkey is 18 minutes. Trust Fund is not on Spotify but it looks a similar length: it is, after all, a 10” at 45RPM. I saw Mike Krol a few months back at the Merge 35 festival and he was great, real highlight of the show. Also he said “Merge is great you can trust Merge any artist on Merge is good one time I saw a Merge artist was playing at Spaceland so I went even though I’d never heard of her and now she’s my wife. Merge will get you married.” Then a woman in his band piped up: “True story.” It was great.
We now have 19 hours left on the “To Investigate” playlist. We made great progress yesterday it was very satisfying. I hope to replicate it today as I spend the entire afternoon working on Nimbus’ 2025 insurance applications, which is always a trip. No one wants to insure computer companies anymore, especially against “cyber insurance” which is not, sadly, insurance against Cyberman attacks or sex over the internet but, rather, IT-architecture-related security breaches. We keep finding a company, they insure us for a year, we have no incidents, and then they just…drop out of the market. It is an ongoing six, no seven-year drama in my life. How will it go this year. Eventually our brokers get it all sorted and our premiums go up a very small amount, usually less than 10% (Shout out to HUB international, best commercial insurance brokers yo).
I thought for a moment I was also going to have to gather all our tax materials for the accountant to do our final 2023 filing but shout out to Kyu who gathered all the material on his vacation last night. Saved me a lot of time I am not what you would call an expert at running reports in Quickbooks. I mean, I can do it, but it feels like every time I do, the CPA sort of looks at me sympathetically and says something like “oh you sweet, sweet child.”
Accrual-basis accounting not my strong point, not gonna lie.
Sorry, was idly thinking last night on a rainy drive back home from Raleigh that I talk about work so little in here that most of the non-personal-friend readers, which make up about half of the audience, might have, like, zero idea I even have a job. I kinda love that, honestly. We are more than our jobs. But I got to thinking in the car: are things too balkanized in my life? Should my job and life be more integrated? And now that I’m writing it out, I think… nah. Never mind. It is fine.
Saw some old friends last night for dinner in Raleigh it was great. Ex-Barbarian Nora is doing a job for, I think, a furniture company, and she roped in Ex-Barbarian Mike and Ex-Barbarian Doug. That is a little vague since, you know, we had more than one Mike and even more than one Doug. Three Dougs, actually. Lotta Dougs. So the four of us plus Nora’s (lovely) husband and Emma all had dinner at this posh old diner in Raleigh that was very good, save for a few quibbles. Little loud, hard to talk. But it was lovely to see everyone.
Rain on the way there, rain on the way home, rain for the next seven days. We had like 20 days of no rain and now like eight of rain and I know a bunch of you live in New York and your summer basically got rained out (was that this summer? last summer? my brain, it’s melting), so I am sorry. But I think we can all agree that we would like it to rain perhaps one or two out of every seven to ten days, and on no more than once every fourth or fifth weekend. Ish. That is what I would like.
Someone here — I think it was a friend of mine from China — remarked about how none of the roads around here have streetlights and boy he was not kidding. I-40 goes straight from Raleigh to Durham, pretty much urban the whole time. Thing should have streetlights the whole way! The whole road doesn’t even have reflective lines on it. Visibility drops waaaay down in even the most mild nighttime rain. I mean, Emma drove, not I, but still. Stressful!
So I have been trying to add to my June oven collection because I love it so much and they have stopped making them. I had one June oven. It broke once, and June kindly replaced it. And even though they’ve stopped making them, for right now, Weber, their parent company, will still replace them if they break. But this service is not gonna last forever on a discontinued product and I am stressed. So I have been attempting to hoard June ovens.
I now have four.
Which is, of course, crazy. But! I actually only have two, because the idjits I buy them from do not know how to pack them. It is maddening. First thing I do is I ask them if they have the original box. No, they do not. Because these people are the sort of people who do not neurotically store every single box to every single item they have ever purchased, even if storing them is annoying and expensive AF. So then I tell them: look, I will buy this thing, but you have to pack it really really really well. They break in shipping all the time. They are heavy and glass. You need to go overboard. I am explicit.
“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” they say. “I will pack it very very well.”
And then they half-ass it and I can tell right when the oven arrives at the house, without even opening the box, that these doofuses did not pack it well, and it is broken.
Then I tip an edge of the box, and I hear the clinking sound. Confirmed.
Now, yes, the first time this happened, I stupidly opened the box, reached in and tried to grab it and sliced my finger bad. That was on me. I’ve been smarter since then.
They have both now been refunded by eBay but: a) I am worried eBay is going to start thinking I’m pulling a scam or something, especially since b) I also had that a-hole dude return a perfectly functional Macbook last week that you may remember me bitching and moaning about. Oh also, as an aside, that dude did another eBay pet peeve: he sent it back to me in much much crappier packaging than in what I sent it to him (man that was a hard sentence in which to not split an infinitive oh shit so was that one oh shit oh shit split infinitive k hole abort abort).
Anyway I think the trick now, should another one come up, is I will offer to send them my box. And have them send it back to me in the actual box. Except that is insane. And I can’t have these people stealing my box.
I am also going to try returning these two broken ones to Weber in exchange for new ones. I know they replace malfunctioning units (with a nominal cost) but do they replace smashed ones? Inquiring minds want to know.
I realize that needing three June ovens in my life is insane but it’s worse, I was shooting for four. I had these visions of sending one to my friend Nick’s kid, who used to be obsessed with June Ovens. Although this last visit, I pointed out to him there was now a June Oven in Chore House, where he was staying, and he was decidedly not excited about it. So I guess no June oven for him (sorry Nick).
So Jane’s ended the tour and I suppose that was the right decision but… assuming it was Dave, Eric and Stephen who ended the tour and Perry wanted to continue, I am really fascinated with the complexity of the decision. Perry needs help, so one could argue that keeping him on the tour is antithetical to that, though of course who’s to say what Perry will do if he is not touring, it’s not like he’s gonna magically go to rehab. And there are the fans — who seem very very upset about this. And there is the crew — not like they’re gonna be able to hop onto another tour, they are now out of work for a few months, are you gonna pay them anyway? And, like, it’s basically logistically impossible to convince all the venues to roll with it and let you guys come and play without Perry: although that would be the best move artistically. But, like, the venues are gonna have to deal with a ton of refund requests, and you might be playing to half-full rooms, etc. etc. It strikes me as a monumentally tough decision, and, of course, for any chance of the thing continuing with or without Perry, all three of you have to agree. I feel like, personally, no shade on their decision, but that I might, might have decided to just suck it up and let Perry be insufferable for another ten dates, and let the fans decide to show up or not.
Then there’s the money. A quick scan shows that the writing credits for XXX and Ritual are given to the whole band, but Perry alone gets the Nothing’s Shocking credits which, actually, not bad! But they are probably not split 25% each. It’s entirely possible at least one band member could use some money. And who’s gonna take the loss for all the sunk costs of rentals and whatnot? Gonna try and put that on Perry?
God, what a mess. Reminds me of closing up shop on a dead startup. It is never pretty, and no one has to do it. The people who are there at the end cleaning up the mess are rarely the ones who made the mess. Goes mostly unthanked. Never pretty.
Finally, Smiths news. Morrissey put out this note saying that Johnny Marr effectively “stole” the Smiths trademark and now Marr can go out and use the name without Morrissey. I have so many questions. I mean, not fundamental ones, I think we all know what happened: somehow Marr got wind of Morrissey trying to do exactly what Morrissey is now accusing Marr of, and Marr did something to stop it. But, like, from a legal standpoint. A technical standpoint. I admit most of my trademark knowledge is around American trademark law, but I have been registering trademarks in many many countries for many many years and I do not quite get how Marr could do this. Like… they own the trademark together (or with Joyce and Rourke’s estate or whatever) and then somehow Marr just… sends his own trademark application to the UK government and they are like “okay cool we’ll just assume this notoriously adversarial band is cool with this change and approve it.” I mean, even if they had never heard of the Smiths, is it weird to give a registered trademark to a new party? Well, I mean in America it’s not, because this entire episode would basically be impossible in America since we pretty much take a “let the courts sort it out” approach, and if Morrissey and Marr owned a joint registered trademark for the Smiths in the US, and then Marr got his own, if Morrissey toured as the Smiths, or put a Smiths album out in the US, no one would stop him, unless Marr sued, then the courts would get it and… who knows what would happen. But it would not magically be Marr’s trademark.
Basically I’m saying I’m confused on Morrissey’s statement means anything because in America it wouldn’t mean jack, and I thought UK trademark law works basically the same way.
On that note, the dude who made Flappy Bird said on Threads recently: “I let my trademark expire so now people are making Flappy Bird games I don’t own” and, like, that’s not how any of this works! You have a copyright on Flappy Bird no matter what! You don’t even need to register it. Sue em! What is going on here? Is he lying? Am I wrong? Are the perps also stupid and think they’re being legal? Are the perps counting on him being stupid?
The world is making me crazy with the trademark and copyright shenanigans!
I wish I had a Jane anecdote for you today but that’s it, that’s all you get, honestly barely saw her after drop-off yesterday, babysitter came at 5 and we were off to Raleigh. Oh wait okay here we go: she and I listened to Olivia Rodrigo this morning in the car and I accidentally put the original versions on ands boy Olivia Rodrigo says “fuck” a lot and I just said “beep” out loud each time Oliivia said “fuck” even though a) Jane knows exactly what the lyric is, b) Emma overheard Jane and friends talking about “the F word” yesterday, though none of them actually used the word within earshot of adults, so I mean, good on you and c) Jane does not care.
Justa Mix for you today. Man that Justa Store allusion explanation is like 500 issues back and this “Justa” schtick probably makes no sense to anyone and I should really, like, make some sort of GMHHAY Inside Joke Decoder wiki but I ain’t got no time for that. It’s a store. In Fairbanks, Alaska. Justa Store. Great name, good liquor selection, gas and hot food to boot. And look, yes, no, the “new” Jane’s song isn’t great, but it’s not terrible. Feel like we’re at a real Sliding Doors moment with them, this really coulda been a triumphant comeback. Alas.
Mildenhall by the Shins came on during my LGA walkabout and I always forget how great that song is, perhaps the greatest Shins song, man I love a good autobiographical growing up song in the style of the Kinks. New Tears for Fears track is solid but not as good as the last album. I heard they used AI on the cover but cannot confirm. Man this is a great mix, almost every song is a banger.
Until tomorrow!